2015 Year End Review

Some­one once told me when I was younger that time speeds up as you get old­er. Being the 13 year old that I was, I pished at him and com­plete­ly wrote off his words of wisdom.

Boy, was he ever right.

It seems like just yes­ter­day I was strug­gling to remem­ber to write ‘5’ instead of ‘4’ on my checks. But, alas, it’s already 2016.

2015 was an awe­some year for me. In 2015 I:

‑start­ed off the new year in Aus­tralia with fireworks
-moved to a new city
‑start­ed a new job
-made new friends
-final­ly got my kitten
-got hon­or­ably dis­charged from the military
-turned 25
-went on an amaz­ing trip to Ecuador

I want to say that I have no clue how this year will be able to top last year, but know­ing my ten­ta­tive plans for the upcom­ing 12 months, I think I’ll be able to have a good time. Just with­in the first week of Jan­u­ary, I’ve start­ed to plan a trip to Chica­go to see friends and go to a Cubs-Car­di­nals base­ball game at “his­toric” Wrigley Field, a trip to Eng­land (hope­ful­ly with my sis­ter) to see the new Har­ry Pot­ter play in West End, and numer­ous oth­er small activ­i­ties through out the year.

As you can imag­ine, all that trav­el and mov­ing about did­n’t come cheap. Thank­ful­ly, I have a great pay­ing job that not only allows me to do all these fun things, but save aggres­sive­ly for ear­ly retire­ment. Post­ed below you’ll find sev­er­al graph­ics of my spend­ing in 2015. After the graph­ics I break­down the cat­e­gories and ana­lyze them for prob­lem areas (things to work on this year), and areas where I suc­cess­ful­ly reduced my spend­ing. Some of my find­ings sur­prised even me!

I’m also going to go out on a limb and talk about my income and net worth growth for the year. I want to be clear: I’m not reveal­ing this infor­ma­tion to brag. I real­ized that only get­ting infor­ma­tion on the spend­ing side of the house pro­vides an incom­plete pic­ture. Some of my read­ers are peo­ple I’ve referred to the blog from real life (aka shar­ing about it on Face­book or through face to face con­ver­sa­tions). I feel as though I’m bar­ing an extreme­ly per­son­al part of me, which makes me a bit ner­vous. But, I know I’m not back in mid­dle school or high school, and that no one will care besides a “huh, that’s inter­est­ing, good for her” type reac­tion. It’ll also be a fun test for me to see which of my real life friends actu­al­ly reads my posts too 😛

2015 Spending:

My total spend­ing for the year came out to be $39,306.30. My goal was to spend less than 2014 ($41,826.40), which I man­aged to beat by $2520.10. Good, but not great. My spend­ing tar­get for retire­ment is rough­ly $23,500, so I’ve got a bit more cut­ting back to do.

Per­haps I’m not being entire­ly fair in com­par­ing the two years since they were com­posed entire­ly dif­fer­ent­ly. 2014 I did­n’t move, and I only took one big trip as opposed to pay­ing for 2 trips. Also, while my spend­ing might’ve been high­er in cer­tain months, I was also get­ting reim­bursed for most of it. Maybe a bet­ter graph­ic would be of net spending/income.

Ah, here we go. This one makes me feel bet­ter. In this one, you can see that only in only ONE month out of the entire year I spent more than I earned.

(That would be Jan­u­ary at -$826, although some months I cut that line very closely.)

Jan­u­ary includ­ed a reim­burse­ment to my sis­ter for mon­ey spent on my trip to Aus­tralia. The next notable months were April and May, when I was busy accu­mu­lat­ing mov­ing expens­es up the wazoo. I had sev­er­al suc­cess­ful low spend­ing months, and then came along my trip to Ecuador in Octo­ber. Decem­ber had a lot of one time big expens­es like Christ­mas and car insur­ance. You can see my income spike in cer­tain months, like March (tax refund), May (mov­ing reim­burse­ments) and Decem­ber (bonus time!).

Cat­e­go­ry wise, my spend­ing looked like this:

Home [$13,668.95]	My rent was off­set at the begin­ning of the year with my room­mate, although that changed when I moved to a new town into a nice new apart­ment. I look for­ward to the day when my mon­ey goes to equi­ty, not lin­ing the pock­ets of an apart­ment com­plex. The mobil­i­ty is worth it though.
Trav­el [$4,990.06]	This includes the wrap up for Aus­tralia, all of Ecuador, and the begin­ning of my Eng­land trip next year. $5k for all that? SCORE!
Food & Din­ing [$4,426.80]	For an aver­age of $368.90/mo, this is high­er than I’d like and will be an area to focus on in 2016. How­ev­er, this includes all gro­ceries, eat­ing out, and alco­hol, which I think is actu­al­ly pret­ty damn awesome.
Shop­ping [$3,858.52]	Def­i­nite­ly an area to work on. This includes all clothes, books, gad­gets, giz­mos and sup­plies for my var­i­ous hob­bies. I’m hap­py it’s not high­er, but not so hap­py it’s this high. Darn you Amazon!
Bills & Util­i­ties [$3,616.40]	Inter­net, Phone and Util­i­ties. This will def­i­nite­ly be low­er in 2016 since I live in a new­er, small­er, 3rd floor apart­ment, and I also cut my phone bill in half by switch­ing to a new provider.
Auto & Trans­port [$2,878.10]	Fuel, oil changes, auto insur­ance and any repairs need­ed. Not too shab­by. Plum­met­ing gas prices def­i­nite­ly helped here. Thanks, Obama.
Pets [$1,726.24]	The cost of my adorable fur ball. He’s been so worth every pen­ny. This year includ­ed the breed­er fee and all of his kit­ten shots, which are one time fees. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how much he costs mov­ing forward.
Gifts & Dona­tions [$999.74]	Every­thing I bought for peo­ple or donat­ed to var­i­ous caus­es. Could it be low­er? Yes, but I don’t mind spoil­ing my friends and fam­i­ly a bit every once in awhile. I love being the cool aun­tie who gives awe­some gifts to my niece!
Fees & Charges [$691.72]	$500 of this is the deposit for my apart­ment, so real­ly it should be $191.72. Still not hap­py it’s that high but it could’ve been worse. 2016 will be lower.
Enter­tain­ment [$509.50]	I am actu­al­ly aston­ished it’s only $500. I feel like I went out and did way more than that, but I guess I did­n’t. This includes things like going out to movies, con­certs, and sport­ing events.
Health & Fit­ness [$476.08]	Things like my gym mem­ber­ship, den­tist and doc­tor appoint­ments, and con­tacts. Some of these I could’ve used my HSA for, but I decid­ed to save that for later.
Busi­ness Ser­vices [$221.95]	The (min­i­mal) cost of get­ting this blog up and run­ning. Not too shabby.
Per­son­al Care [$112.20]	Hygeni­cal stuff and hair­cuts, basi­cal­ly. Pret­ty good for a girl 😛

That about cov­ers all the spend­ing stuff. Now onto the good stuff: how much did I make last year? For the first half of the year, I had two jobs: work­ing my bor­ing yet high paid office job, and my slight­ly less bor­ing but infi­nite­ly low­er pay­ing mil­i­tary job. I also was bring­ing in some extra mon­ey from rent­ing my extra room to a friend.

My total income for the year was $86,707.55 before tax­es! Not bad for some­one who’s 2 years out of col­lege, sin­gle, lives in the Mid­west (aka pret­ty low cost of liv­ing) and does­n’t have any debt. That means that all of the $55,000 (ish) I got after tax­es was all mine to spend. The break­down in income cat­e­gories is as follows:

Office Job	$77,000: Includ­ing bonus, but not includ­ing employ­er match in my 401k and HSA
Mil­i­tary Job	$1,753.76: I was done with mil­i­tary stuff in April, so this is only those 4 months.
Oth­er	$7,931.70: Rent from my friend, reim­burse­ments for mov­ing, and tax refunds.
Inter­est:	$22.09: Mon­ey I earned from my cash sav­ings accounts. Bet­ter than noth­ing I suppose!

My goal for 2016 is to break the $100k bar­ri­er in earned income. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly take home pay, but over­all. I’m going to make this hap­pen through a com­bi­na­tion of rais­es from my office job, income from a rental prop­er­ty and mon­ey earned through a cre­ative side hus­tle I want to start. Of course, all of this is a moot point after I win the $1.3 bil­lion Power­ball draw­ing on Wednes­day (hah, total­ly kid­ding. But it’d be nice!) If I can raise the amount I earn, it will only help accel­er­ate my time­line to FI.

Speak­ing of being FI, I’ll need a net worth of $587,500 if I’d like to quit my reg­u­lar office job by the time I’m 35. I start­ed out 2 years ago at age 23 with a net worth of $10,000. I’m proud to say that as of Decem­ber 31^st, 2015 my net worth was $82,981! I’ve achieved this through putting as much as pos­si­ble into my 401(k), Roth IRA and some into my HSA instead of spend­ing it on crap­o­la I did­n’t need. Here’s a chart from the last 2 years detail­ing my progress:

As you can see, my net worth has tak­en a bit of a tum­ble since the end of 2015. If I did­n’t need to have such a big chunk of cash on hand for the prop­er­ty I’m buy­ing, I would take it and front load my Roth IRA for the year as every­thing is cheap­er to buy. But, I can’t do that right now, so I’m going to hang tight and not change any­thing. I have faith the mar­ket will go up.

Accord­ing to my pro­jec­tion, I’m a month ahead of where I expect­ed to be when I did the pro­jec­tion this time last year. Mad Fien­tist’s Lab­o­ra­to­ry says I have 9 years and 8 months to go before I can retire, which match­es my own pro­jec­tions. I’m right on tar­get with my plan (or maybe slight­ly ahead) and could­n’t be hap­pi­er. Here’s to hop­ing that 2016 goes just as smoothly!

How did last year look for you? Any big plans for 2016?